Z-Day – Are you still Alive?

The past 6 months have seemed have been pretty quiet for ZDay. Unfortunately most of the ZDay development team have been busy getting on with other areas of their lives and haven’t had a lot of time to devote to the game. Remember, no-one on the team is getting paid, we’re doing this for the love, blood, sweat and tears, and because we want to make a zombie MMOFPS. However, we have been making progress.

So what the hell have we been doing?
If you have a look at the Gallery you’ll see that there are whole bunch of new screen shots showing new areas of the city.

AI
In the last blog posted, Andy spoke about the new Nav Mesh system which is used by the bots. This will mean smarter zombies that know they can run around the back of the building get at you! Andy has been working on completing this system and still adding the final touches.

Modeling
The Creative Team have been focusing making the many objects that fill the city and help give the player a sense of immersion. This includes things like tables, chairs, cars… whatever. These are the things that go in the buildings and around the city streets. We currently have about 5sq km of city to fill with stuff. This includes residential, commercial, retail and industrial areas. Its a big job.

Buildings
We’ve also been making new buildings and areas, shops, apartments, petrol station, parks and even a sports ground. This is England – the footballs are round! As you know the design goal for ZDay is to allow players to get inside most, if not all the buildings in the playable areas of the map, and so far we’re looking like we going to achieve that goal.

Sound
Derrick, our sound guy has been creating footstep, bullet strikes, pain, death, gore and zombie sounds to fully enrich the ZDay experience. Just playing the sounds by themselves is creepy enough – can’t wait to get the in the game.

Mapping
Mapping involves the placing of all the game objects into the game map and we’ve been doing a lot of it lately. It can get boring at time and is a real labor of love. I want to thank all those that have been involved in mapping as its tedious, but something that just has to be done. You’ll notice in the latest screen shots that the rooms are not as empty anymore.

So where to next?

Before we run the next pre-alpha test we need to:

Have the Nav Mesh system in place (so players don’t end up shooting each other of boredom due to dumb AI)

Script in the new sounds

Add more buildings

Place more objects around the map

Once we’ve fixed any major bugs that we’ve found from the pre-alpha – we might even spend the money we’ve made from advertising on a dedicated game server. That way we can run a closed alpha test for members of the ZDay Community.

Head-2-Head!

ZDay pitches players head-2-head in this chilling survival FPS.

Infection of Furor City

The city is infected, fallen comrades rise to pursue you. Can you survive?

Test Yourself

Survival is an art but is it an art that you can Master? Are you good enough?